You're in the narrow part of the notch now, with the rock close on both sides and the water running beside you — so this is the right place to tell you about the worst night in the history of the state of Vermont.
November, nineteen twenty-seven. It had been a wet autumn; the ground was already full. And then a storm came up out of the tropics and stalled over these mountains and rained. Not for an hour. For a day and a night, somewhere on the order of nine inches of it, falling on ground that couldn't take another drop.
Now think about the shape of this state. Vermont is nothing but narrow valleys with a river at the bottom of each one — and beside each river, because there's nowhere else to put it, runs the road. And the railroad. And the village.
All that water came off the hillsides at once, into the brooks, into the rivers. And every one of those rivers came up out of its bed in the dark, all across the state, on the same night.
It took the bridges first — hundreds of them, more than a thousand, snapped off and carried away. It took the railroads, whole miles of track twisted and hanging. It took roads, mills, houses, barns with the animals still in them. Whole villages went. Eighty-four people drowned in Vermont, which does not sound like many until you understand there were only about three hundred and fifty thousand people in the entire state — and among the dead was the lieutenant governor of Vermont himself, swept away trying to get through.
Here is the part I want you to carry. Vermont had no money and no help coming. The federal government did not do that sort of thing yet. So Vermont rebuilt itself — dug out, put the bridges back, and did it before the snow. And there is an old, likely-embroidered story that when President Coolidge, a Vermonter himself, was offered federal relief, the state declined it. True or not, Vermonters repeat it, and that tells you exactly how they want to be understood.
Every bridge you cross today is standing on the lesson of that night. And in two thousand eleven, when the water came again and took the roads again, people up and down this valley used the same word for it. They called it another twenty-seven.